Slavoj Žižek on The Act of Killing and the modern trend of “privatising public space”

The documentary The Act of Killing, which premiered in 2012, provides a unique and deeply disturbing insight into the ethical deadlock of global capitalism. The film – directed by Joshua Oppenheimer and shot in Medan, Indonesia – reports on a case of obscenity that reaches the extreme: Anwar Congo and his friends are now respected politicians but they used to be gangsters and death squad leaders who in 1966 played a leading role in the killing of as many as 2.5 million alleged communist sympathisers, mostly ethnic Chinese. The Act of Killing is about “killers who have won, and the sort of society they have built”. After their victory, their terrible acts were not relegated to the status of the “dirty secret”; on the contrary, Anwar and his friends boast openly about the details of their massacres (the way to strangle a victim with a wire, the way to cut a throat, how to rape a woman pleasurably . . .).

In October 2007, Indonesian state TV produced a talk show celebrating these men; in the middle of the show, after Anwar says that their killings were inspired by gangster movies, the beaming moderator turned to the cameras and said: “Amazing! Let’s give Anwar Congo a round of applause!” When she asked Anwar if he feared the revenge of the victims’ relatives, he answered: “They can’t. When they raise their heads, we wipe them out!” His henchman added: “We’ll exterminate them all!” and the audience exploded into exuberant cheers . . . one has to see this to believe it’s possible.

The film is, in a way, a documentary about the real effects of living a fiction. According to the film’s makers: “To explore the killers’ astounding boastfulness, and to test the limits of their pride, we began with documentary portraiture and simple re-enactments of the massacres. But when we realised what kind of movie Anwar and his friends really wanted to make about the genocide, the reenactments became more elaborate. And so we offered Anwar and his friends the opportunity to dramatise the killings using film genres of their choice (western, gangster, musical). That is, we gave them the chance to script, direct and star in the scenes they had in mind when they were killing people.”

Did they reach the limits of the killers’ “pride”?

[Extract. Appeared in New Statesman, on July 12th, 2013. (full text).]